Digital preservation in the regions
A report published in 2005 by MLA and the Digital
Preservation Coalition (DPC) throws out a challenge
about the future access to digital museum, library and archive collections.
The survey is a contribution to the DPC's assessment of digital
preservation needs in the UK and will inform the
development of a national digital
preservation strategy. It looked at non-national museums,
libraries and archives in two English regions to discover how
well prepared they are to deal with the problems of keeping
digital material in the long term.
Some key findings were:
- The organisations surveyed expressed a need for help and
advice on a range of digital preservation issues.
- Awareness raising on the whole issue of digital preservation
is needed.
- The bulk of activity covered by the survey has been the
digitisation of existing collections rather than in tackling
the issues raised by born-digital material.
- Long-term management of digital material needs to be more
firmly embedded in corporate thinking and planning.
Digitisation is making more museum, library and archive
collections accessible across the internet. Digitisation mean
that objects and information in different places can be brought
together to create virtual collections, matched to the
particular needs of the searcher. MLA and DPC are working with a
range of national partners to ensure that the knowledge held in
those institutions can be accessed wherever and whenever it is
needed.
But this survey shows that these digitised collections may be at
significant risk of being lost to future generations if the
issue of digital preservation is not addressed.The report shows
that whilst there is a significant commitment to digitisation,
with over 80 digitisation projects currently in place, 90% of
the projects were externally funded and took no account of the
need to provide the long-term, sustainable support needed to
preserve and protect public access to the digital collections.
The survey involved a sample of museums, libraries and archives
in two English regions - the North East and the West Midlands,
in collaboration with the North East Museums Libraries and
Archives Council (now Museums, Libraries
and Archives North East) and Museums, Libraries
and Archives West Midlands. It was undertaken for MLA
by Duncan Simpson over the period December 2004 to April 2005.
The report is availble to download as a Word or a PDF file:
as are the detailed findings of the survey:
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